Sometime late on Sunday evening, when the lights on the set have gone off for the last time at the Players Championship, Rich Lerner will scrub at the makeup that never quite came all the way off during the week.

If he’s in the mood, the longtime Golf Channel anchor might allow himself to grow a stubbly beard for a couple of days. Even one day off is going to feel like a vacation, coming off easily one of the most demanding weeks of Lerner’s year.

The Players Championship, which begins Thursday, is the PGA Tour’s most favored child, its biggest production. The tour doesn’t own any of the four majors, so it created the Players and stages it at TPC Sawgrass, on the grounds of tour headquarters in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.

If it’s important to the tour, it most certainly is to Golf Channel, and this year the coverage will be wall to wall, more extensive than ever. NBC Sports Group, of which Golf Channel is a highly visible part, will offer 22 hours of live tournament coverage and another 57 hours of news and talk.

More than 400 people combined between NBC and Golf Channel will work on the broadcasts.

“I’m not sure that people fully appreciate what goes into it,” Lerner said on the phone Sunday. “It’s like election coverage.”

If the Players is like the rest of Golf Channel’s programming, the investment will pay off with another round of record ratings. Golf Channel is on an unprecedented roll, setting viewership marks with each passing week.

Many scoffed when Alabama cable entrepreneur Joe E. Gibbs hooked up with legend Arnold Palmer to raise $80 million to start a 24-hour golf network in 1995. Wasn’t that an awfully narrow niche? How could they possibly fill the time?

The Big Three networks seemingly had a stranglehold on golf tournament coverage. How many infomercials and instruction videos and old-time clips could you run?

Eighteen years later, all the critics have been answered. Golf Channel has become such an integral part of professional golf it’s hard to recall the landscape without it. It is the network of record for the sport, every golf fan knows it, and they are watching in record numbers.

The first quarter of 2013, with 25.5 million unique viewers, was the most-watched quarter ever for Golf Channel. April and the Masters arrived with more record numbers as viewership was up 11 percent from the previous year. The momentum would indicate that Golf Channel likely will set a yearlong viewership record for a third straight time.

“This is a great business, especially as competitive as I am,” said Golf Channel President Mike McCarley. “You get a scorecard every single day because the ratings come out every day. A lot of what we’re doing is giving our viewers more of what they want.”

McCarley is the highest-ranking member of the management team assembled when Golf Channel owner Comcast acquired control of NBC Universal in January 2011. Five days later, McCarley was promoted to be NBC Sports Group’s golf chief after previously being a vice president of marketing and promotions at NBC Sports.